Monsters run Rampant

Rampant Design Tools provide creepy textures
By Ko Maruyama

Rampant Design Tools have created a series of images for post production FX in the past. Their newest offering is just in time for the Halloween holiday. MonsterFX Undead provides a series of images that you can use in post for video or still photography.

There are more than 575 textures including packages of ghoulish facial features that you can apply to any imagery you'd like. They're designed for human faces of course, but as individual still images, you can apply these to just about anything you'd like.

There are several packages that you can download or purchase on disc that cover major features of any good monster face: eyeballs (or deep sockets without eyes), ears, lips, noses, mouths, teeth, cheeks, and brows are included. Additionally, there are skin textures and wounds that will help you to "flesh out" your ghoulish composite.

The elements that I've downloaded and tested are created in Adobe Photoshop format, and are compatible with just about every compositing software I can think of - and will probably fit within your post production pipeline too.

If you're going to use these in a still composite, they're pretty simple to use. They contain their own alpha channel. Any photo compositing tool that supports importing bitmap images and alpha channels should have no problem.

For video composites, you'll need to track the Rampant Design Tool elements onto the footage yourself. MonsterFX Undead is a series of elements for composite - and can be used alone individually, but are more successful when applied with additional color correction. In order to track these prosthetic elements onto your footage, you may want to use your favorite tracking software.

How to enter: Create an interesting or scary or humorous "Halloween" inspired short video that uses any of mocha AE or mocha Pro's features including: Planar Tracking, Rotoscoping, Screen Inserts, 3D Camera Solve or Object Removal. Upload your video to Youtube or Vimeo. Tag your video: mocha Halloween When your video is ready to be viewed email us the link, your full name and email address.

Ko Maruyama is a freelance animator in Los Angeles. In addition to working on film and broadcast animations, Ko teaches at Pasadena's Art Center College of Design - focusing on motion design. When working, writing or testing software allows, you can find him lending a hand in the After Effects board and lurking among the Cinema4D, Visual Effects and Photoshop posts within the DMNForums.Related Keywords:animation, holiday halloween, zombie, photoshop, video, creativemac, animationartist To Comment on This Article, Click HERE